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Once on the tracks, you never go back

2008-04-26T02:59:00Z

As much as I enjoyed my years developing in Visual Basic and then in C# and ASP.NET, it’s hard to even remember what made it fun. At least, looking at it from the language perspective. The projects were often fun, and I love the creative nature of writing code in general. But the languages were not elegant and the code produced just wasn’t beautiful in the way that I expect code to be these days.

I keep getting emails about .NET positions day after day. After spending over two years working in Rails, and working exclusively in Rails for the last year… how could I go back to .NET? Even if Rails work was impossible to find, I can’t imagine leaving the world of dynamic languages and MVC frameworks.

After yet another job shake up, I’ve found myself in the position of having to really consider the stability of a .NET position. There are lots of them out there, but what is stability without joy in what you’re doing day in and day out? So rather than throwing in the towel, I’m just going to try and take my destiny into my own hands. I’ve launched Rent-A-Railer and I’ve started marketing my independent services. As the name indicates, I’m staying on the Rails. I’m a hired gun, I’m an expert consultant, I’m a moonlighter, I’m and one-man wrecking crew… whatever services you need, I’m your guy! And if it’s more than I can handle, we’ll call in the big guns from Re::Rails.

So if you’re looking for complete end-to-end development services, or you just need someone to step in and get your project launched, get in touch and let me help you succeed. Available for hire… Rent-A-Railer is just a call away.

Introducing... Re::Rails

2008-04-14T14:30:00Z

I’m excited to announce that a new consulting company has formed out of the team that created Lypp. The goal of Re::Rails is to bring this same level of Rails expertise, and proven success to your projects.

Web Application Triage.
Your deRailed projects need not be abandoned. Our team has the skill and experience required in order to properly assess, scope and deploy your Rails project in rapid fashion.

Ruby on Rails Design and Development.
ReRails specializes in the complete design, development and deployment of commercial Ruby on Rails projects. We handle the entire process from concept to production.

Visit Re::Rails online to find out more.

Lypp + Highrise Mashup Contest

2008-04-07T09:30:00Z

Gaboogie and 37signals have teamed up to create a cool VoIP mashup contest. The signup date has been extended until April 15th.

The Lypp API is RESTful, and supports both xml and json. The API also supports Conditional GET, PUT and DELETE. What I really like about Lypp is that the API is a first-class citizen. The application was designed with a heavy emphasis on the API to make integration with the service a primary interface.

So get on board for the mashup contest and see what brilliant ideas you can come up with. Cutting edge technology, all the Rails goodness and lots of cool prizes… what more could you want?

acts_as_conference in review

2008-02-12T13:00:00Z

Wow, it’s such a relief that the conference came off as such a huge success. This was the first time that Rob, from Rails For All, Naomi and I had ever produced a conference event. But apparently we knew enough to not only make it happen, but to actually achieve all that we set out to do. All the reviews circulating in the blog realm are echoing exactly what we had envisioned when planning acts_as_conference.

As with anything of this size and complexity, there’s plenty of room for improvement. We had some issues with the venue, such as spotty wifi and an obstructed view of the projection screen. But the staff at the Holiday Inn (Universal Main Entrance) was very responsive to our requests. Additionally, we need to provide more bottled water for our speakers and we really needed a little more room overall.

Again, I want to really emphasize how awesome our sponsors were. The team from Sun was around all weekend offering great support, amazing tool demos and some very exciting news about upcoming advances for Ruby/Rails thru JRuby and GlassFish. The Engine Yard crew was there providing great support information for common Rails issues, from performance to security and scalability. The guys from Unfuddle pitched in to help us setup the room Thursday night. They were hanging out in all the sessions and always available to lend a hand when needed. Less Accounting had a large presence and provided plenty of humor throughout the event. Rails Machine threw a cool party on Friday night where all the attendees were free to socialize, enjoy food and drink and win some cool prizes. I won’t mention everyone here, but not because the unmentioned sponsors don’t deserve it. I just don’t have time to cover it all.

Our speakers also delivered the goods. Our two keynote speakers were challenging, articulate and inspiring. Our overall goal was to provide both a wide breadth of topics as well as adequate depth in material. Our local community is fairly advanced in their knowledge, so the conference had to provide value for them primarily. We had great presentations on several extending technologies like Adobe Flex/Air and JRuby. We also had several different perspectives on Best Practices, Working with Teams, Teaching Technology and Test/Behavior-Driven Development. To drive the material deep, we had a couple in-depth talks on creating DSLs in Ruby, ActiveRecord and Adding Media to your Rails apps. I believe that our speakers were all top-notch talent with great, but sufficiently humble perspectives on what’s working and what’s not.

If you missed the first acts_as_conference event, you owe it to yourself to plan ahead for next year. There’s already talk of acts_as_conference 2009, right back here in Orlando, FL. Bigger? Better? It’s going to be hard to out do ourselves. Many thanks to those who attended this year… it was a success because the community made it possible.

acts_as_conference is rockin'

2008-02-09T08:40:00Z

I’ve been so busy the past couple of days as acts_as_conference got underway. We had a huge last-minute response that left several people wishing there were a few more spots. The turn-out is absolutely amazing and we can’t say enough about the sponsors, speakers and attendees that have made this a success.

We’re about to get underway with day-two. There are lots of great talks coming up today and I hope that everyone comes away recharged, enlightened and ready to come back again next time.

acts_as_conference is almost sold out

2008-01-29T10:00:00Z

There are only 26 seats available for acts_as_conference, so get your seat before it’s too late. We are in the final stages of pulling the conference together and we’re very excited about the speakers, topics and community that will converge in Orlando on Feb 8th-9th, 2008. You should be with us… no time left for indecision.

Hallelujah, no more mooing!

2008-01-08T09:30:00Z

A few weeks ago I began to notice a significant amount of noise emanating from my Macbook Pro. It started as a winding sound and grew louder and louder as the processor and hard drive worked feverishly to process 380,000 records of property data from the county. The noise became a sustained mooing sound that was insanely loud for a laptop.

At first I thought it was the hard drive, which really concerned me. It seemed to ebb and flow with the amount of processor and disk I/O the Macbook was handling. After a few days I had to figure out what it was, so I turned to google. In the end it was YouTube that provided the answer. It turns out that Macbook Pros are notorious for two problems, bad batteries and mooing fans.

So at this point, since I am not the original owner of this hardware and am not covered under any Apple Care program, I decided to service it myself. A few searches revealed that a handful of online stores carried the replacement parts, but I couldn’t find anyone who had it in stock. I added my email to be notified when inventory became available and put it on the back-burner.

After another week of enduring the worsening noise, I made another quick search for the part. To my surprise I stumbled upon powerbookmedic.com, who just happened to have one unit in stock. I placed my order in a most furious manner to assure that some other mooing fan victim didn’t snag the last available right fan assembly on the entire Internet. With a sense of great victory, my order was processed, confirmed and shipped in a matter of hours.

The part arrived yesterday and I made the simple swap last night. All is well, and the mooing fan has been silenced. A quick run of rake spec:rcov confirmed that the new fan is functioning and the noise has been squelched. I sincerely hope that I don’t need a left fan assembly anytime soon.

Determine the current migration/schema version in Rails

2008-01-04T21:31:00Z

I’ve been searching for this solution off and on for a while. There are some features that we don’t want to turn on until the database is migrated past a certain point. It’s pretty rare, but it has come up a few times, so I wanted to document the solution here.

ActiveRecord::Migrator.current_version

Thanks to Jay Fields for the answer. He is a wealth of great information!

InfoQ interviews Robert Dempsey on acts_as_conference

2008-01-02T16:00:00Z

There’s a great write-up on acts_as_conference, which is fast approaching in February. Check out the interview with Rob, which highlights our objectives and also scoops some of the latest announcements about the conference including an exciting give-away for those who attend the charity session.

The buzz is going to continue to build and we hope to see the remaining 100 seats go quickly in the next couple of weeks. The acts_as_conference event has something for every web developer who wants to elevate their skills, experience and expand their professional network. If you are already doing Rails or even if you’ve just dabbled with it, you can go much deeper in this two-day event.

Smooth Upgrade to Leopard

2007-12-31T12:00:00Z

Well, I was prepared for a little more pain in upgrading to Leopard. I guess because I took the upgrade path instead of a clean install it required less effort. My existing Rails setup is fully functional by my early assessment. MySQL is alive and kicking, and mongrel fires up just fine. There may be some unnecessary residual stuff by upgrading vs. doing a clean install, but my time is more valuable than a pristine installation at this point.

As a precaution, I went ahead and bought an external hard drive to do a full backup. I’m really amazed at the affordability of drive space these days. I bought a Western Digital My Book, 500 GB USB 2.0 drive for about $120 at Best Buy. I plugged it in and it worked right out of the box. I had read up on the best backup/clone software and had downloaded Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper!. For some reason though, neither application would successfully complete a backup. So I dug around a little until I found that the My Book drive was preformatted as FAT32, which is cross-platform, but limited to 4GB files.

So I reformatted the My Book drive to Mac OS Extended (Journaled), verified permissions on my drive and fired up CCC one more time. This time, after 6 1/2 hours, my hard drive was successfully cloned and verified. Feeling secure that my applications and data were safe and accessible, I launched the Leopard installer and everything went smoothly from there.

Today, I’m back to work, finding time to explore the new features of Leopard a little at a time. My Rails environments are functioning as expected and all my supporting applications seem to work. I guess we’ll see if everything continues to work as I get further into some of my edge scenarios, but so far I’m very pleased.

Santa brought me Leopard

2007-12-26T23:36:00Z

Having recently converted to a MacBook Pro a few months ago, the top item on my Christmas wish list was Leopard. I’m actually quite surprised that Santa remembered! From the looks of it I’m going to need a couple of other upgrades, namely RAM and HDD, while I’m at it. But…I’m not sure Santa will approve those additional expenditures.

Now I just have to find the time and the nerves to backup my current build and upgrade. I was kind of hoping other, smarter people would endure the pain and trouble of setting up and documenting the idea Rails on Leopard configuration. Maybe the way has been sufficiently paved ahead of me by now.

acts_as_conference

2007-12-10T19:57:00Z

If you haven't heard yet... we're holding a regional Ruby/Rails conference here in Orlando on February 8th & 9th. If you haven't registered yet, what are you waiting for? If you wait too long, you may miss the event or have trouble finding a hotel nearby. Tickets are only $100 and you'll get to be a part of the first Rails-centric conference in Central Florida.

If you are working with Rails, or even if you've thought about working with Rails then you won't want to miss this event. There's so much to learn from some of the biggest names and brightest developers from this region.

Register Here

Check out the schedule and the great line-up of speakers and topics.

A new home, a new blog

2007-12-10T18:27:00Z

I’ve been working to wind down all of my websites that were hosted with Site5 as my account was nearing its expiration. I have relocated everything to my new home with Slicehost. Site5 was a great hosting company and they lived up to their esteemed reputation for having great customer service. However, I decided that it was time to grow up a little bit in the world of Rails hosting, so I got myself a tiny “slice”. It’s been a great learning experience moving from a managed/shared hosting environment to a VPS hosting solution.

So, the upside to VPS hosting is that I have full control over my server’s configuration. This allows me to create my ideal Rails environment with only the things I need. I’ve decided for most of my applications that Lightspeed, Rails and MySQL are more than adequate. The downside is that I have full control, which leaves me to my own devices.

For this blog I decided on Mephisto since it seems to be the simplest, best supported, Rails-based blogging application available these days. I don’t know if I’ll convert my old wordpress blog content or not. To be honest, there wasn’t much valuable content there to make it worth the effort. I have comments turned off until I can install better spam filtering. I’ve had a lot to do just to get my sites fully functional, so it’s a slow process to get everything back to 100%.